POLSCI 240 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: The Conscious Mind, Sigmund Freud, Spreading Activation
10 May 2018
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Political Psychology Lecture Notes
8.31.16 What is Political Psychology?
How to access Google Scholar (on PPT)
ISPP (International Society of Political Psychology)
Application of what is known about human psychology to the study of politics
Study of human behavior within the political context
Rational choice theory: theories of how citizens should think and behave are used as models for
how citizens do think and behave
o Taking normative theories and applying them to people’s behaviors
o People choose the one that maximizes the probability-weighted utility
o Does not require narrow selfishness
o Preferences often assumed to be rooted in some form of economic self-interest
o Ex: we vote for the candidate who is closest to our own set of ideologies/preferences
Behavioral theories: take people as they are; seek descriptively accurate theories of human
behavior
o Bounded rationality = the limits and quirks of human cognition shape how citizens
engage with the political world
▪ Working memory, stereotyping
▪ Working memory – there is a limit to the amount of information
• Methods that minimize the amount of effort for people to remember things –
low-effort cues (political party!)
o Contrast with RCT – attempting to understand how people actually are rather than trying
to create ideal principles that humans allegedly follow
o Humans are not cold information processors – emotions matter
▪ Emotional states, regardless of whether the source is related to the political issue,
will subsequently influence their political judgment
▪ Relevant to campaign advertising (fear ads or anxiety ads typically target the out-
party group and tries to persuade them to switch party loyalties)
o Political preferences are not always rooted in material self-interest – people have
expressive, other-oriented, and group interests
▪ Values, group consciousness
o The conscious mind is the only the trip of the iceberg – cognition outside of awareness
matters
▪ Implicit attitudes (can be the immediate, affective response that is largely
uncontrollable upon presentation of the stimulus), spreading activation
▪ Measuring implicit attitudes is a good method for measuring attitudes that are often
not acceptable to express explicitly (ex: racial preferences)
• Effect of education?
• Study sound that education exacerbated the implicit attitude
▪ Spreading activation – attitudinal changes that occur when people are asked about
their preferences depending on the context of their mind/life events
• Assumes that preferences are constructed on the spot when asked about
them in surveys
Example: Voter Turnout
o Votes may or may not count
▪ Probability that your vote is the swing vote is so small
▪ If you quantify the probability that your vote matters is about 1 in 10 million
o One of the classic counterexamples to rational choice theory
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